October 20th 2014 marked the official launch of Next Century Cities a new, city-to-city collaboration that supports community leaders across the country as they seek to ensure that all have access to fast, affordable, and reliable Internet. The event included a video keynote from FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, a panel of city leaders moderated by Susan Crawford, and another of city tech officers. Audio/video is below.

On Wednesday, May 28, 2014 the Open Technology Institute (OTI) presented a panel – Localism Over Consolidation: An Exploration of Public Broadband Options – in Washington DC, a discussion of various approaches to local investment in broadband. The panel featured a diverse set of experts on public broadband networks and projects, including the manager of a municipal fiber network in Wilson, NC. Panelists discussed different approaches communities have taken so far and share thoughts on what steps other local governments can take going forward to support access to affordable and high-speed broadband. Speakers: Christopher Mitchell, Director of Community Broadband Networks, Institute for Local Self-Reliance; Joanne Hovis, President, CTC Technology & Energy; Will Aycock, General Manager, Greenlight, Wilson, NC; Catharine Rice, President, SouthEast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (SEATOA). Moderator: Sarah Morris, Senior Policy Counsel, New America’s Open Technology Institute. Video is below.

On Wednesday March 27 2013 the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau will hold the first of a series of Gigabit Community Broadband Workshops. This follows Chairman Genachowski’s Gigabit City Challenge proposal on January 18. The goal of this workshop is to explore how current gigabit communities deployed their networks, the economic and social benefits that accrue to gigabit communities, ways communities can aggregate demand in order to make a gigabit network deployment more economically appealing, and how communities can leverage their assets to incent an ultra-fast network. The workshop will be free and open to the public and will be webcast live via fcc.gov.

On Wednesday February 6 2013, Allied Fiber CEO Hunter Newby – a good friend of ISOC-NY, appeared on Craig Settles’ Gigabit Nation Internet radio show. Ostensibly the topic How Would a Susan Crawford FCC Chairmanship Impact Broadband‘ was recent proposals that Obama appoint Susan Crawford as the next FCC Chair, and Newby strongly supports the idea, feeling that she uniquely has the savvy and perception to carry through the necessary changes to overcome the current inertia. The conversation soon went into further detail of ways and means. Needless to say, Hunter advocates open access to rights of way, and that municipalities lay dark fiber systems in their neighborhoods, for utilization by both incumbents and newcomers. It’s a good listen.

Today, Thursday, January 31st, 2013, Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP) and the New Networks Institute will host a Reverse ALEC Legal Hackathon at Brooklyn Law School. The invitation-only event, something of an emergency meetup, brings together experts, lawyers, advocates, technologists and competitors, who are concerned with the state of telecommunications in the United States. The goal is to create consensus and build a campaign to define principles for model regulation, pursue legal actions, and create a working path to accomplish the following goals

• Reverse the ALEC-state-based telecom and cable infrastructure deregulation, which has passed in varying degrees in multiple states.
• Stop the immediate threat: AT&T has petitioned the FCC to remove all telecom regulations and keep broadband networks closed, based on concepts in the ALEC-state based ‘model legislation’ that is now used in states and will be presented to Congress.
• Create a proactive, pro jobs and economic growth alternative model that is based on the principle that everyone in America is entitled to a very high speed broadband service that can handle cable, internet and phone services, where the customer selects the providers they want.

Participants include Susan Lerner (Common Cause), Bruce Kushnick (New Networks), Jonathan Askin (Brooklyn Law), Earl Comstock, and David Rosen. The morning plenary session will consist of three panels to outline the issues which, I am happy to report, ISOC-NY has arranged to webcast live via the Internet Society Chapters Webcasting Channel. There will be an opportunity to participate remotely via the livestream chat. No live captions, sorry.

More information
AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink, working with the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, have been able to pass “model deregulatory legislation” in 23 states and there will be more attacks in the remaining states. While these bills vary, their target is to close down all major telecom regulations and obligations including ‘carrier of last resort’ –where the company no longer has to provide phone service, much less upgrade the networks. At the same time, on the federal level, AT&T has petitioned the FCC to use this ALEC-based approach to close down the networks nationwide and has got the FCC to set up a ‘task force’ to make this happen.

While couched as “Internet freedom”, in reality this is only freedom of regulation for the communications companies. 50% of the US will be pushed into ‘digital dead zones’ as AT&T and Verizon are not upgrading about half of their territories; even wireless services are impacted as most cell sites and Wi-Fi hot spots connect to a wire.

As of this writing
• AT&T has submitted a Petition to the FCC to start the process of ‘transitioning the networks’. Comments are due on Jan 28th, 2013; Reply comments February 25, 2013
• Greg Walden of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee has announced hearings starting February 5th, 2013. We expect he will be proposing legislation in Congress to finish the job.

Alongside this, 19 states legislatures have closed municipalities’ ability to offer competitive broadband services and more are expected.

Giving the wired companies monopoly controls over their wires also impacts everything from competition and innovation to the price of service – or even who gets service, and customers will have no recourse. It also means no plans for major upgrades, thus no cable or even broadband competition. And it gives control over all aspects of service, from Net Neutrality or bandwidth caps, to acting as a policeman of content or blocking innovative services.

Last OneWebDay – Sep 22 2011 – ISOC-NY hosted the Bob Frankston talk: Infrastructure commons – the future of connectivityin which he laid out the “Frankston Doctrine” – the heretical view that communities should build and operate their own communications infrastructure, entirely dispensing with telcos and usage-based billing. Long a lone voice in the wilderness, Frankston’s ideas are now beginning to get some love. On Valentine’s Day – Feb 14 2012 – OneWebDay founder Susan Crawford used her Bloomberg column The Case for Publicly Owned Internet Service to rail against State laws that prohibit municipal broadband initiatives.

The telecom industry has reached its peak. This is it. Look around you. Whatever you are doing in telecom, however you are making money in the field, it isn’t going to get better than this. This industry has acquired its maximum share of the economy. We are the digital railroad business at the height of the railroad barons. The only way now is down. We’ll see maybe one or two more mini-booms, a few more troughs, but the long-term trend has just gone into reverse.

and concludes:

Home networks don’t need service providers. You just buy a box and plug it in. Street-level networks don’t either — you can build a simple resilient mesh. Nor do town networks that join the kids with their school. We fundamentally don’t need communications service providers to manage data transmission. As long as we have a means to fund infrastructure, just as we manage with roads, we can do it for ourselves.

This is the beginning of the end of the Information Superrailroad, where all the bits are scarce and billable. Broadband ISP service is a branch line to nowhere.

Unlicensed wireless is the automobile, and local open fibers are the roads. It doesn’t carry very much very far right now, but it will. And with it, the fate of the telecom industry as constituted today is sealed. Like with the railroads, telcos will carry ever more traffic, and will protect themselves with political power. But their heyday is over, and a new disruptive model has emerged.

Like this:

As North Carolina contemplates its “Level Playing Field/Local Gov’t Competition” act aka H129. FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn has issued a statement strongly condemning H129, and similar anti muni-broadband legislation around the country. Describing the bill as a a significant barrier to broadband deployment Clyburn says:

“The National Broadband Plan recommended that Congress clarify that State, regional, and local governments should not be restricted from building their own broadband networks. When providers cannot meet the needs of local communities, the Plan provides that State, regional, and local entities should be able to respond accordingly, as they were able to do when municipal governments distributed electricity to thousands of rural communities during the 20th Century. Unfortunately, this National Broadband Plan recommendation continues to be ignored by some broadband industry members that are encouraging these misguided efforts.”

Like this:

Thank you Guy for covering this fantastic and far sighted story. My guess is that businesses will respond and seriously consider relocating to cities and communities that follow Wilson’s lead and put in Fiber To The Home (FTTH). Thus communities with FTTH will recover faster than other communities over the next 3 to 5 years in America.

And we are talking all the way to and INTO the home, any other solution is a waste of time and money.

When Google announces their five cities in 2011 there will be just over 30 communities in the USA offering bi-directional synchronous Fiber broadband to the home. EPB has been working since the 1990s to give birth to their FTTH offerings.

This map shows you those communities: http://sn.im/1axal4 (In case other Americans are considering where to move to in order to find opportunity for themselves and their families.)

Most consumers simply do not know that their supposed broadband is restricted by their provider to below the FCC definition of broadband, 768Kbps. (Admittedly 100Mbps/100Mbps should have been the standard in 2000 and 768Kbps is very out of date with reality) Speed Tests lie and deceive, they just show you that you have the “chance” to get that speed. Those of us running DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato firmware on a supported firewall/router see our actual bandwidth in real time. We see the lie for what it is. It is not uncommon (though it should be) to see a marketing promise of 16Mbps/2Mbps throttled to less than 40Kbps/10Kbps.

It should be against the law for those providers to call their service broadband if they do not meet their marketing bandwidth promises/targets at least 99.9% of the time. There is a solution, its called synchronous or bi-directional broadband…simply put the same speed upstream as downstream. That map shows you the communities that offer synchronous service. At best its false advertising, at worse it probably violates RICO statutes and should be criminal.

Thus is the state of broadband in America as of November 27, 2010! Sad, very sad!